Tag: Wall Street

On Tuesday, February 6, 2018, I joined Carol Costello on CNN’s HLNin studio. The stock markets are extremely volatile with a record point loss yesterday. Sean Hannity blames President Obama while President Trump has taken credit for every high. Should Trump take credit for the correction, too?

Here is a little clip.”…thanks to Pres. Obama who took us out of the Great Recession and put the policies in place that brought unemployment down. That trendline started in 2010 and sure didn’t start with this president.”

“What comes up must go down too. And so there will be another recession and this is going to happen potentially under Pres. Trump’s watch.”

The news today is deeply disturbing regarding United Airlines and the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) having major computer system shutdowns due to “technical glitches.”

Coincidence or cyberterrorism? This matches patterns of escalation from malware in our infrastructure, attacks on banks, hacks on companies like Anthem Blue Cross, our government under siege with the theft of records. It only makes sense that the hacks continue to reach new levels in their attempts at theft and undermining the American economy.

First thing this morning United Airlines reported that their systems were hung, taking almost two hours to recover. This “glitch” affected over 3,500 flights and hundreds of thousands of travelers throughout the air travel system

Then the NYSE halted all trading at 11:32am EDT as a major technical issue crashed the trading systems. The highly redundant and scalable systems implemented for trading don’t just crash from a glitch.

These both have the hallmarks of attacks, probing for weaknesses, resulting in tests to determine the capability to damage systems and our economy.

World War III might not be found with weapons in the sense that you know them. It is very possible a war could happen with just electrons, destroying our way of life.

UPDATE 11:16am PDT 7/8/2015 – The Los Angeles Times is reporting that NYSE officials are claiming there was no attack, “internal technical issue.” While entirely possible, it is actually more plausible that the highly redundant, highly available systems that they use were actually shutdown the moment a breach was monitored and the shutdown was a precautionary measure to isolate the incident before it could cause any major damage or theft. The hardware and software architecture used in the NYSE trading systems have multiple redundancies built-in, so an internal technical issue is nearly impossible.

A cooperative (“coop“) or co-operative (“co-op“) is an autonomous association of persons who voluntarily cooperate for their mutual, social, economic, and cultural benefit.[1] Cooperatives include non-profit community organizations and businesses that are owned and managed by the people who use its services (a consumer cooperative) or by the people who work there (a worker cooperative) or by the people who live there (a housing cooperative), hybrids such as worker cooperatives that are also consumer cooperatives or credit unions, multi-stakeholder cooperatives such as those that bring together civil society and local actors to deliver community needs, and second and third tier cooperatives whose members are other cooperatives.

I lived a good portion of my life in Minnesota where farmer co-ops are giant businesses, controlled by the member farmers, like Cenex and Land O’Lakes. Credit unions are member owned co-ops, act a lot like banks with checking accounts and car loans, and yet credit unions made only one-fourth the number of bad loans compared to the big banks.

Look at what Minneapolis is doing! From a Minneapolis Star Tribune article, “Co-ops boosting retail on Central Avenue in northeast Minneapolis”:

Dan Nordley, a small-business owner who is also a leader in the cooperative movement that has deep roots in Minnesota history, said the success on Central is positive across many fronts.

“Too much business is disproportionately driven by people who just want to make money on money,” he said. “This one is more about providing goods and services to a community that needs it for its general livelihood.”

Co-ops already have set up shop in two other buildings in the area. The first was a co-op grocery, Eastside Food, that opened 10 years ago this week and now boasts 4,475 members. In 2011, some of its members formed Northeast Investment Cooperative (NEIC) to buy, rehab and manage commercial property. It’s now filling its first building at 2504-06 Central.

Co-ops are business owned by the members who shop there. What a great idea for taking control of your own, and community’s destiny when disillusioned with a cold, corporate approach.

I am partial to co-op food stores. There were many good stores in Minnesota like Lakewinds and The Wedge. The best part is they answer to the customer-owner, stocking food that is requested, particularly organic or non-GMO foods, strive for great customer service, and when the store turns a profit a dividend check is issued to each shareholder-customer!

I discussed this on KSCO Presents on November 13, 2013, in light of New Leaf Community Markets in the Santa Cruz area being bought buy a regional chain out of Portland, Oregon, which is owned by a private equity firm. And I wondered aloud on-air why the center of the fresh, local, produce world doesn’t have more co-ops.

We need to consider a nationwide movement of creating customer friendly, community focused businesses that serve the interest of the dual-role customer and shareholder.

I doubt the system failure explanation on the part of Nasdaq. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars per year on ultra-high performance computing systems with redundancies at every level of the systems. It is extremely unlikely that a system failure occurred without an outside influence.

Update 8/22/13 12:10 Pacific Time – Trading is set to resume right now. Securities and Exchange Commission spokesman John Nester said: “We are monitoring the situation and are in close contact with the exchanges.”